Forked Roads Back

25 - ARCHIE

QUITE AMAZINGLY, I WAS able to get some sleep once I was able to quiet my mind.

I don't know how long I was out for, but when I wake again, I've been disconnected from my drip and Lara is asleep in the chair next to me. Her prosthetic is detached and she's curled up in a ball, using some of my blanket to cover herself.

She looks so peaceful I don't want to wake her, but when I shuffle up in the bed, I manage to dislodge the covers and send her prosthetic crashing to the floor. She wakes with a start, and I grimace as she glares in my direction.

"I was trying not to wake you," I say with a chuckle as I lean over carefully to pick her leg back up and hand it to her.

She takes it and puts it behind her, cheeks pinking at me seeing it. I knew she'd lost it, because I'd seen her in physical therapy sessions. But I also couldn't help but notice that she always seems a lot less pained when she didn't have it on. But for now I decide to keep that to myself.

"You were absolutely dead to the world when they came to set your arm by the way," she says, pointing to my other hand. "So I told them you wouldn't mind pink."

She grins and I quickly turn my head.

She wasn't kidding. My arm is now decorated with an elbow-high fluorescent pink cast.

"Ohhhhh my god. I officially hate you," I chuckle, swatting at her arm as I lean sideways.

"I even signed it too."

I turn my arm over and see a small signature at the bottom of a very good drawing of someone flipping me off. Underneath it says 'sucker' and I can't help but laugh.

"You are something else, you know that."

She giggles as she sits up cross legged. "I have been told that before."

I shake my head as I smile wider than I had done in a while. There's something about her that just lifts me in a way I never thought was possible. Not in the same way as before - no one would ever be able to lift me that way again - but this was a start.

"So did the doctor tell you anything else while I was sparko?" I ask.

She shakes her head. "Nope. Well, only that you'll probably be good to go tomorrow. Which is handy, because after a text exchange with your sister," she says, holding up her phone, smirking as she scrolls through a flurry of messages which includes a picture of me asleep, "she is now arriving tomorrow evening."

My mouth bobs open and closed like a dumbfounded goldfish. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. A stranger, who I'd barely spoken to before the last few weeks, has done all this for me.

"You did all this?" I ask.

She shrugs. "You would have done the same for me."

And with that smile, I know I would have. But from the pain underneath it, a pain that I recognise all too well, I know she'll never be able to have what it is she's giving me.

"Come here," I say, gesturing her up on to the bed.

She shakes her head but when I insist she gets up and slots herself into the gap, curling herself up into a ball.

"This is really weird," she says after we've been quiet for a couple of minutes.

"Yeah, I'll be honest, it worked out better in my head."

She giggles, shaking my body as she does, and soon the two of us are laughing so much we can't breathe. Laughing until tears fall from our eyes. Laughing until our bones turn to jelly and we can't talk straight.